Chinese Tyranny 2.0

Survivor Lizhi He, a practitioner of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, spent 1,280 miserable days in a Chinese gulag. At a 2013 summit attended by this writer in the Israeli Knesset that focused on Communist Chinese organ harvesting, the survivor of the regime’s prison camps told his story to the assembled lawmakers and dignitaries, and described the savage torture he endured — months of being forced to sit motionless, severe beatings, being soaked in cold water in the winter, electroshock torture, humiliation, dehumanization, and much more. Many victims never make it out alive, though, so Lizhi, who almost lost his life at the hands of his captors, was fortunate in at least one respect.

Charged and prosecuted in a “sham” court for allegedly “sabotaging the implementation of the law,” Lizhi was imprisoned for his unwavering beliefs that defied the official orthodoxy espoused by China’s totalitarian rulers. The regime considers Falun Gong — a discipline it once promoted — to be an “evil cult” that must be suppressed at all costs. So when Lizhi, an award-winning engineer with the Construction Ministry, was caught sending letters to friends and colleagues explaining what he viewed as the truth about the movement, the reprisals were swift and horrifying. He was abducted in Tiananmen Square and hauled off to be tortured and brainwashed.

The prison camp was brutal. “In addition to the physical torture … we were forced to read literature defaming Falun Gong,” he explained after describing the barbaric torture methods employed against him and his fellow inmates — especially other prisoners of conscience and Falun Gong practitioners. “I was shocked by high-voltage electric batons.... All of these atrocities targeted my beliefs and conscience. Falun Gong prisoners were never treated like humans unless we gave up our beliefs.” He was also conscripted as a slave laborer making products for export.

Even today, countless victims remain in China’s notorious prison camps because of their beliefs. “It is sad to say that my experience of incarceration was just one of the hundreds of thousands of experiences of innocent Chinese people who practice Falun Gong,” Lizhi explained, urging the world to speak out. “Such tragedies are still happening in China in the name of law.” While the Canadian government helped rescue Lizhi and his wife, and Amnesty International and other organ­izations took up his cause, many others have not been so fortunate. At the same summit in Jerusalem where Lizhi told his story, a documentary entitled Free China: The Courage to Believe highlighted other atrocities — and it is all ongoing.

Despite claims to the contrary, the regime ruling mainland China remains brutal and authoritarian to the core — and it is now being groomed to play a leading role in what globalists and the dictatorship itself refer to as the “New World Order” (see the related article "China: Staking Claim in the New World Order"). If the Communist Party regime is going to “own” the New World Order, as globalist billionaire and Obama ally George Soros put it, what might such an order look like? To get a sneak preview, a look at the regime itself offers many hints.

Suffering, Suffering

Many Westerners today have a much more positive image of the People’s Republic of China than that reflected by Lizhi’s testimony at the Israeli Knesset or by other eyewitness accounts. Even many who are aware that the regime has been one of the most totalitarian in history nonetheless believe that the PRC has “reformed” and is no longer even “communist.” But why should the word “communist” no longer apply to China when the regime itself officially claims to be communist? And why should we believe that despots have suddenly become “democrats” when mass murderers have not been brought to justice, and when, in fact, the regime still honors past communist rulers such as the blood-drenched Chairman Mao?

Of course, apologists for the regime who claim that Beijing today is less authoritarian than Mao’s Communist Party have a point. After all, under Mao, the Chinese Communists murdered more human beings than any other cabal of criminals and mass-murderers in all of recorded human history. To be less murderous than Mao and company, then, is hardly a noteworthy accomplishment. However, the claim that the “new and improved” Chinese tyranny is much different or superior to the “old” is more than a little disingenuous. The post-Mao regime, which is a product of Mao’s legacy, has never relinquished absolute, unrestrained power over its citizens. This was made very evident by the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre of peaceful protesters on June 4, 1989. And it is evident today, for anyone who is willing to open his eyes and look at the regime’s actions.

For example, while the outright mass extermination of dissenters has largely gone by the wayside, mass murder remains a hallmark of Beijing rule. The regime continues to slaughter millions of unborn children in forced abortions — part of its savage “one-child policy” — with assistance from the U.S. taxpayer-funded UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and Planned Parenthood, according to congressional testimony by experts. Despite allegedly “easing” the grotesque one-child policy, millions of women and unborn children in China continue being subjected to forced abortions, in addition to mass forced sterilizations and other crimes.

Just last month, an international scandal erupted when a teacher, five months pregnant, was ordered to have her child slaughtered — after having previously obtained permission from authorities to have a second. “Their experience dramatically demonstrates what I’ve been saying all along: China is continuing its horrific practice of late-term forced abortions,” Reggie Littlejohn, the president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told LifeNews. “This is savagery and it must be stopped.” That particular kill order was halted, but only thanks to tremendous domestic and international pressure. To give some insight into just how little value China’s ruling cabal attaches to human life or the rights of women, consider that a few years ago at a UN “climate” summit attended by this writer in Copenhagen, an official representative for Beijing bragged about how China’s coercive one-child policy is reducing its “carbon footprint.”

Beyond mother and unborn children, other family members can also be punished when a woman has more than her allotted children. Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught lawyer who was ruthlessly persecuted by the regime for his activism before escaping to the United States via the U.S. embassy, recently testified in Congress about the savagery. “To achieve its goal of population control, the Communist Party has established a vast system to carry out its policy. The Party has also signaled to those on the front line that jailing, beating, eviction, demolition and other such policies are not beyond the red line, even at the cost of life,” he explained. “In my village and neighboring villages, we could often hear and see groups of people, from a dozen to several dozen and headed by their local party chiefs, acting like bandits, beating villagers, and holding them in defiance of legal procedures, day and night. We could hear screaming and crying during these operations.... If these Communist bandits failed to get the pregnant woman to submit to a nighttime operation [abortion], they would take away family members, relatives such as uncles and aunts, siblings, and even other neighbors within a diameter of 50 meters of the target, usually including 10-20 households, by force, often with cruelty.”

Other classes of Chinese citizens are also butchered on a regular basis by China’s communist leaders for various reasons — especially members of the spiritual movement known as Falun Gong, to which Lizhi belongs. According to countless defectors, experts, survivors, and other sources, Beijing literally harvests body organs from political prisoners such as Falun Gong practitioners. Former Canadian Member of Parliament David Kilgour, also a former minister of state for the Asia-Pacific region, described the ghoulish slaughters in a book on the subject entitled Bloody Harvest. The book documents the author’s long investigation into China’s well-established organ trade. It concludes that the bazaar of organs comes not just from criminals sentenced to die, but from Falun Gong practitioners persecuted for their beliefs.

Those in disfavor with the regime who are not killed for their organs by Beijing’s butcher squads often face brutal treatment in China’s re-education gulags. A report released last year by Chinese Human Rights Defender (CHRD) about the regime’s “black jails” noted that in these secret gulags, whose occupants are up to 80 percent women, savage acts are perpetrated against “unofficial” prisoners. The victims never even have the benefit of a sham trial in one of the autocracy’s kangaroo courts. The report, “We Can Beat You to Death With Impunity”: Secret Detention & Abuse of Women in China’s “Black Jails,” describes the abuses in horrifying detail. “Inside these shadowy detention cells, the predominantly female detainees — including elderly women, migrant women, women who lost land or were victimized by forced eviction, women with disabilities, and mothers with young children — are subjected to appalling abuses, from physical and sexual assaults to deprivation of medical treatment,” the human-rights group explained.

Falun Gong practitioners are hardly the only targets of Beijing belief-focused persecution. Among others, the regime ruthlessly persecutes Christians and other minorities, as well as anyone and everyone who dares to challenge its tyranny, through denial of work permits, imprisonment, and even death. And despite claims that the persecution is easing, the facts say otherwise. According to China Aid, a Christian human-rights organization, the dictatorship’s crackdown on believers last year reached levels unseen in at least a decade, surging by more than 10,000 percent over 2013 in terms of the number of believers sentenced for practicing their faith, particularly in underground churches. But even regime-approved and -managed churches have found themselves in the autocracy’s cross hairs.

China Aid’s 2014 Annual Report of Religious and Human Rights Persecution in China, dubbed “The Year of ‘Persecution and Endurance,’” shows that religious persecution and human-rights abuses perpetrated by the regime in Beijing have risen by a shocking 153 percent over 2013 overall, based on six specific categories of persecution. In addition to the number of believers sentenced (which jumped from 12 in 2013 to 1,274 in 2014), the other categories of persecution are: the number of religious persecution cases, the number of believers being persecuted, the number detained, the number of severe abuse cases, and the number of individuals in severe abuse cases. Every category saw drastic increases in 2014 over the year before, Texas-based China Aid documented in its report.

China Aid has documented 572 cases of persecution in which 17,884 religious practitioners were persecuted — a 300-percent increase over the prior year. Because information is so tightly controlled by the communist regime and its Orwellian censorship and repression apparatus, the real figures of abuse are almost certainly much higher, China Aid acknowledged.

Beyond oppressing Christians, the government also seeks to control them, establishing regime-controlled “Protestant” and “Catholic” denominations that take orders from the atheist Communist Party of China, rather than Scripture or the Vatican and other church hierarchies. “The sinicization of Christianity amounts to de-Christianizing the church in China and eradicating the universal nature of Christianity under the appearance of constructing a ‘Christianity with Chinese characteristics,’ and, in the name of prioritizing the interests of the Communist Party, usurping Christian doctrine that ‘Christ is the head of Church,’” explains the 2014 China Aid report documenting the actions.

China’s government is even oppressive outside is own borders. Enduring decades’ worth of brutal occupation and terror are the people of Tibet, a country that has illegally been occupied by Communist China for more than six decades. More than a few analysts have accused Beijing of “genocide” in the formerly sovereign nation as China works to destroy the Tibetan culture and people — even importing massive quantities of Han Chinese to displace the previous occupants. Estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have disappeared. Tibetan monks have been treated especially ruthlessly, with the regime regularly murdering, kidnapping, and forcibly “re-educating” (brainwashing) them with “patriotic re-education.”

In 2011, the barbarity made headlines worldwide when communist “security” forces surrounded the Kirti monastery after a monk set himself on fire to protest the extermination of Tibetan culture by Beijing. Some 100 monks were “disappeared.” “As a former political prisoner, I have personally experienced the kind of torture inflicted on Tibetans in Chinese prison,” said Lukar Jam, the vice-president of a Tibetan organization of former political prisoners. “The Kirti monks are innocent and are under attack for simply expressing their internationally recognized right to freedom of religion.” Beijing says it is all for their own good.

Also suffering from Communist Party of China persecution is the Muslim Uighur population of Western China in Xinjiang. Many of the locals are against being ruled by Beijing and are seeking to regain independence. In response, the dictatorship has engaged in a brutal crackdown, with its “security” agents reportedly massacring protesters on the spot and firing indiscriminately into crowds of civilians on a regular basis — most recently killing four and wounding dozens after shooting into a protest in May 2014. “China is consciously hardening its policies against Uighurs,” Seyit Tumturk, the vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, told Al-Monitor. “Especially the harsh crackdown on religious values that the Uyghurs respect has nothing to do with combating terror. It is ethnic and cultural genocide on pretext of combating terror.”

Moreover, Beijing is working on a plan to uproot hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers from rural areas and forcibly relocate them to centrally planned new cities built precisely for that reason. The New York Times described the scheme as the “Great Uprooting,” evoking memories of Mao’s ghoulish “Great Leap Forward.” Those who resist the forced evictions will face the wrath of the regime, as hundreds of millions of innocent Chinese have in years past. But, it will all be “legal,” as the regime’s constitution makes clear that all land is owned collectively.

But isn’t this “uprooting” the price of progress? Today, apologists for the regime often point to the growing prosperity of China and its alleged turn toward liberalizing the economy as evidence that Beijing has learned the error of its ways. Even here, though, the facts — and the regime itself — say otherwise. Consider, as just one example, the fact that virtually all of China’s major companies are actually owned and run by the regime, which can crack down on workers — dictating pay, where they live, etc. — on a whim. Even those firms that are not technically “state-owned” are largely run by pseudo-“capitalist” cronies of the ruling communist oligarchs. Foreign companies in China, meanwhile, must agree to extreme restrictions — often including participation in joint ventures with Chinese “companies” and “sharing” their technology and intellectual property — as a condition of operating in China. In late May, the Communist Politburo even approved a “regulation” ordering every workplace, even at nominally “private” companies, to have a Communist Party unit so that party policies can be “implemented across society.”

In other words, despite the appearance of markets, the giant Chinese companies are in actuality just extensions of the regime, and the economy is firmly under the iron fist of Beijing’s tyrants. According to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which ranks 178 countries based on how free they are economically, Communist China, in 139th place, is “mostly unfree” and among the most controlled in the world. The autocracy describes its “state-capitalism” regime as “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

There are certainly no “free markets” in China, then, except perhaps underground, but there is even less of a “free market” when it comes to ideas and opinion. The Chinese dictatorship operates the most sophisticated censorship regime on the planet, strictly controlling the Internet and the state-owned “news [propaganda] media.” The Orwellian information-control apparatus, often dubbed the “Great Firewall of China,” denies Chinese subjects access to anything the regime does not like. If they dare express themselves publicly, the comments will be censored and the thought-criminals duly punished. Only a totalitarian state fears and suppresses freedom of speech, religious freedom, and a free press.

Despite claims that Communist China is moving in the direction of greater freedom, the facts on the ground show otherwise. The tyranny may be slightly less obvious and overt, but the tyrants remain as ruthless and autocratic as ever. To borrow a phrase from George Orwell, if you want to know what a future “New World Order” led by Beijing might look like, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Americans must resist.

Photo: AP Images

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